Saturday, February 2, 2013

High School Student Suspended for Thought Crime

..Daniel McClaine, Jr., a freshman at Poston Butte High School in Tan Valley, Arizona, made the mistake of setting a picture of a gun as the desktop background on his school-issued computer.
The picture shows an AK-47 lying on a flag, reports KNXV-TV. The gun isn’t his, McClaine assured the ABC affiliate in Phoenix. He found it on the Internet and liked it, partly because he is interested in serving in the military after graduation.

A teacher reportedly ratted McClaine out after noticing the Soviet-era rifle on the computer. McClaine originally received a three-day suspension.

After McClaine’s father contacted the local press, Florence Unified School District officials suddenly decided that the younger McClaine could return to school on Monday.

District policy states that students cannot use school-issued laptops to send or display “offensive messages or pictures,” explains KNXV. Students also cannot use them to produce, retrieve, send or forward images that are considered “harassing, threatening or illegal.”

It’s not clear who determines what is “offensive” or “threatening,” or the basis upon which the determination was made in this case.

The administrator who made the suspension should be fired, and the teacher who snitched should be sentenced to a month of mandatory gun safety training, to show that images of guns, however scarey looking, present no harm to the student or the student body.

There is a deliberate educational movement afoot to "denormalize" guns in America, and only brutal action to it's enforcers can halt it.